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SCEA Working on Something Called “TV Superstars”
This trademark filing, listed Sept. 11, shows Sony Computer Entertainment America is working on something called “TV Superstars.” One can only hope it involves Gabe Kaplan and Lynda Carter, and Telly Savalas, smoking during an interview with Howard Cosell. The filing covers “computer game and video game software,” for “operating a real-time game for others…
By Owen Good -
Inconveniently Order Pizza from Your PS3
Much as I wish there were more to this, like in-game XMB pizza ordering with voice, there isn’t. Sony’s put a Papa John’s button on the system browser homepage, but it just opens the Papa John’s site in the browser. Which means the convenience factor is quite low compared to going to PapaJohns.com on a…
By Owen Good -
Tomb Raider Co-Creator: Games Moving Toward Hollywood Business Model
Toby Gard, co-creator of Tomb Raider who left Crystal Dynamics earlier this month to become a consultant, gave an interview to GamesIndustry.Biz in which he said game development’s going all Hollywood, and that’s where he fits in. Right now, Gard (pictured above) says, the m.o. is to fire a bunch of people at the end…
By Owen Good -
Trademark Filed for True Blood Game
Crap!!! Is it too late to splice a post with Bloodcopy? We’d actually have some news for that thing. HBO’s filed a trademark registration for its show “True Blood,” in relation to video games. Noted USPTO watcher Superannuation first caught the filing, listed last Friday. Doesn’t mean they’re gonna make a fangbanger video game, they…
By Owen Good -
Atari Gets a New Money Man
Atari found its new chief financial officer from TheLadders.com. Not that they went literally advertising on the service, which promises careers paying more than $100,000 annually. They got the guy who was its veep for finance. Philip Veneziano, say hello to a customer base even more finicky and prone to complaint than high-strung white collar…
By Owen Good -
Xbox 360’s Processor Delivers Budget Supercomputing
A team of researchers pulled off some supercomputing on the cheap using a single Xbox 360’s graphical processing unit, instead of an array of processors operating in tandem, the BBC reports. The researchers, at the University of Warwick in the United Kingdom, think they’re the first to repurpose the processors as an inexpensive substitute for…
By Owen Good -
AT&T tells Feds that Gaming is not “Broadband”
The games industry is unhappy that AT&T, in comments filed with the Federal Communications Commission, described real-time online video gaming as an “aspirational service” of broadband communications and not a core need. The dustup comes as the FCC is seeking to define the term “broadband,” which isn’t just an academic debate. The definition the FCC…
By Owen Good -
Beatles: Rock Band Required Six Months of Lawyerin’
When you’re building something like The Beatles: Rock Band, the development cycle isn’t entirely on the coding end. A team of lawyers for the Beatles worked for six months on the likenesses, names and trademarks that went into the game. The Lawyer, a legal industry site, reports that the U.K. firm Eversheds handled a slew…
By Owen Good -
Minority Report: The Non-White Gamer’s Experience
Fergus Mills searches for the words. It’s clear he wants to say this carefully. The 22-year-old from Macon, Ga. is black. His Xbox Live avatar is black. Except that it’s not. Drawing it out of him, Mills says it’s because of the avatar’s body language. And while Mills doesn’t say that’s really a white guy…
By Owen Good -
SafeSearch is OFF
To: Luke From: Owen Re: The Weekends are Made For The dirty secret here is we’re all mindful of our traffic. Why not? The running total is right there beside every story, and I refer to it when I write this note to tell you what the big stories were the past two days. Assigning…
By Owen Good -
A Post-Apocalyptic Marriage Proposal
This is the most touching marriage proposal involving the word “motherfucker” – and a spiked baseball bat – I’ve ever seen. A woman enlisted the help of Fallout’s modding community to build a level in which she popped the question. The video is of the entire level, eight minutes long, but to summarize – the…
By Owen Good -
Here’s 90 Seconds of the Force, Unleashed on Hoth
I’ll acknowledge Star Wars:STFU The Force Unleashed did not live up to the hype. I think one reason I lost momentum is that I really didn’t care about the worlds in which I was playing. This might be a reskin of the game, but going back to Hoth, one of the trilogy’s most iconic settings,…
By Owen Good -
Game Crazy Exec: Used Games Drive 20 Percent of New Sales
Speaking to IGN, Game Crazy‘s director of used games, Marc Mondhaschen, said the company did a study for “a very large vendor” and found that credit from trade-ins covered 20 percent of their sales over four weeks. “So you got 20 points of their sales that wouldn’t happen unless we had a trade business going,”…
By Owen Good -
Rick Astley vs. the Hydra: Let the Scribblenauts Mayhem Begin
“The real reason people will waste their time on this game is too see sharks devour drowning tax collectors,” writes Idoliside at Hellforge. So he set up a number of gratifying encounters to preview who would win. Butcher vs. Pig? Easy, the pig turned into a yummy ham. Satan vs. a Priest in a Tank?…
By Owen Good -
A Final Look Inside GRIN’s “Fortress”
An anonymous tipster attended GRIN’s going-out-of-business sale at the closed studio’s offices in Stockholm and snapped several pictures that seem to be of its work on, among other things, the Final Fantasy game it was rumored to be making for Square Enix. UPDATE – While some of this art is from the Final Fantasy game,…
By Owen Good -
Week in Games: Super Tuesday
This coming week is the first classically huge week of the Fall to Holiday sales cycles. Scribblenauts, Marvel Ultimate Alliance 2, Wet and Need for Speed: Shift would all command top billing with a week all to themselves. Here they battle it out in a huge scrum that also includes the releases of NHL 10…
By Owen Good -
Kotaku’s Top 5 List of Top 10 Lists
Each week throws off several new video game lists ranging from the humorous to the trivial. What’s better? A list of those. Here’s a roundup of the rundowns out there. No, you’re not seeing things. We moved the Top 5 of Top 10s to this day and time to free up some space on Saturday,…
By Owen Good -
Castlevania Rebirth Rated, Coming to WiiWare
Konami has another ReBirth title in the pipeline: Castlevania the Adventure. The title just picked up a Teen rating from the ESRB and should arrive on WiiWare, the same as its Contra and Gradius siblings. Here is the ESRB listing: Castlevania the Adventure ReBirth Platform: Wii Rating: Teen Content descriptors: Animated Blood, Fantasy Violence Rating…
By Owen Good -
‘Dawwwww’ is Not in Scribblenauts, but ‘Plush’ Is
Crafts-maker Rosemary Travale hadn’t done video-game related work in about three years, and this week’s release of Scribblenauts inspired her to bring main character Maxwell to plush life. Look, he even has a little-bitty notebook and pencil! Materials: “His gloves are made of plastic vinyl, his clothes cotton, his body is canvas and linen, his…
By Owen Good
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